On June 15th, we plan on sending letters, emails, gifts, and any other niceties and kind words to a real bro, Keanu Reeves. Keanu has come on some tough times lately, and doesn’t seem to have the same youthful lust for life as he did even ten years ago. Please participate in Cheer Up Keanu Day, and hopefully bring a smile to Keanu Reeves’ face.
In case you don’t know, Keanu’s sister Kim was diagnosed with leukemia many years ago. If you want to make a more significant gift, consider donating to a cancer research charity in the name of Cheer Up Keanu Day. I’m sure a letter or email informing Keanu of this action would really make his day. Check out Cell Science for a nice directory of cancer charities around the world that you may donate (or even volunteer your time) to.

BBSs–“Bulletin Board Systems” were the precursors to today’s internet. Totally low-tech and restricted by hardware and bandwidth limitations, they were text based and you accessed them over a phone line, but by signing into one or hosting your own you became part of an elite nerdy culture of people communicating with each other and sharing software and information.

ASCII art was born to create graphical representations within hardware and display limitations, and considering how our graphics have improved and how easy it is to design things with our modern tools its impressive to see what has been created with such a limited palette.

I ran a one-node BBS, but more often I was logging into other systems within my area code that wouldn’t rack up long distance charges on my parent’s phone line. I had a little chart next to my computer to show when the off-peak times were so I could schedule my downloads of Wolfenstein, Doom and related maps, tracker software and .mods, and .tar’d text files of information that might be considered quasi-legal to be in possession of.

Director Jason Scott pent quite a few years on his own and created a 2-DVD 3-DVD talking-heads box set of a documentary on BBSs, including the history, culture, and available technology at the time. It also features music by 8-bit artist Paul Slocum aka Treewave who makes music with a Commodore 64 and a dot-matrix printer. MP3s are here.

If you’re like me and once ran a BBS, you need to show off your nerd cred by snagging an ExSysOpt-shirt. And yes, although I’m certain that the talking heads featured in BBS: The Documentary are likely 99.9% 90% male, the t-shirts are available in ladies’ sizes, too.

The creators of OhGizmo! (the niche, gadget / technology / weird things blog) have spun off a blog devoted entirely to robots. Not only is robotic technology ever-innovating, more and more people have come to develop a humanoid soft spot for our cybernetic friends (just do an Etsy search for Robot and look what pops up), so the OhGizmo! people definitely have their finger on the pulse.

While it focuses mainly on small, consumer-oriented robots like the evil Hello Kitty Robot, I-Sobot (shown), and Spyke, there are some pop culture robot references, like “The top 50 movie robots”. No word yet on if they’ll cover military / industrial use robots, or go ga-ga over the adorable Pleo, but the blog is super new so it remains to be seen.